Hardscrabble; or, the fall of Chicago. a tale of Indian warfare eBook

His companions turned their eyes in the direction
indicated, but, almost immediately after Jackson had
spoken, it had disappeared wholly from view.

“What did it loot like?” asked the corporal.

“It must have been a mush rat,” returned
Jackson, “there’s plenty of them about
here, and I reckon our diving has disturbed the nest.”

Corporal Nixon now took his leap, but some paces farther
out from the shore than his companions had ventured
upon theirs. The direction was the right one.
Extending his arms as he reached a space entirely
free from weeds, his right hand encountered the cold
barrel of the musket, but as he sought to glide it
along, in order that he might grasp the butt, and
thus drag it endwise up, his hand disturbed some hairy
substance which rested upon the weapon causing it
to float slightly upwards, until it came in contact
with his naked breast. Now, the corporal was
a fearless soldier whose nerves were not easily shaken,
but the idea of a nasty mush rat, as they termed it,
touching his person in this manner, produced in him
unconquerable disgust, even while it gave him the desperate
energy to clutch the object with a nervous grasp, and
without regard to the chance of being bitten in the
act, by the small, sharp teeth of the animal.
His consternation was even greater when, on enclosing
it within his rough palm, he felt the whole to collapse,
as though it had been a heavy air-filled bladder,
burst by the compression of his fingers. A new
feeling-a new chain of ideas now took possession of
him, and leaving the musket where it was, he rose
near the spot from which he first started, and still
clutching his hairy and undesirable prize, threw it
from him towards the boat, into the bottom of which
it fell, after grazing the cheek of Collins.

“Pooh! pooh! pooh,” spluttered the latter,
moving as if the action was necessary to disembarrass
him of the unsightly object no longer there.

A new source of curiosity was now created, not only
among the swimmers, but the idlers who were smoking
their pipes and looking carelessly on. All now,
without venturing to touch the loathsome looking thing,
gathered around it endeavoring to ascertain really
what it was. “What do you make of the creature?”
asked corporal Nixon, who, now ascending the side
of the boat, observed how much the interest of his
men had been excited.

“I’m sure I can’t say,” answered
Jackson. “It looks for all the world like
a rat, only the hair is so long. Dead enough
though, for it does not budge an inch.”

“Let’s see what it is,” said the
man with the long hooked nose, and the peaked chin.

By no means anxious, however, to touch it with his
hands, he took up the spear and turned over and over
the clammy and motionless mass.

“Just as I thought,” exclaimed the corporal,
with a shudder, as the weapon unfolding the whole
to view, disclosed alternately the moistened hair
and thick and bloody skin of a human head.